Conveyor ovens are increasingly popular in commercial baking. Food to be baked (such as, unbaked loaves of bread) is loaded on a continuous conveyor which passes through a heated oven chamber to emerge in baked form on the other side. In order to be efficient, such ovens must be carefully sealed and insulated to retain heat. Cooling the oven for maintenance and cleaning takes a long time—as much as several hours.
In the course of use, debris tends to accumulate in the bottom of the oven, below the conveyor—crumbs, loose flour, grease and sugar drippings, and even pieces of food can be trapped or fall through the conveyor, which is often of loosely linked chain. These combustibles can and do cause fires in the oven.
Accessing the interior of the oven can be problematic, especially in the event of a fire. There is frequently not enough time to completely cool the oven to access the source of the fire and extinguish it. Left unchecked, a fire can cause tremendous damage to the oven, surrounding areas, and may even cause human injury.
The problem of debris in ovens has been recognized. Some have proposed crumb trays or drip trays as a means of collecting the debris. However, such solutions do not address the fire risk from the debris. The trays are not insulated or fire-proof, nor do they provide any assistance for accessing a source of fire, while the oven is in operation.
Typically, the trays are provided in a relatively low baking temperature oven (such as for restaurant foods), in which heat loss through the bottom of the oven is not a huge efficiency or safety issue. However, these are not convenient for high temperature conveyor ovens, where the oven must be a carefully enclosed space.
It would be desirable to provide greater accessibility to the bottom portion of the oven while it is in operation without sacrificing sealed/insulated efficiency.